The Urban Fantasy Anthology Part 16

With Farrell gone, she felt curiously excited and apprehensive at once, as though she were meeting another lover. She brought a chair to the window, placing it close to the steamer trunk. As soon as she sat down, NMC plumped into her lap, kittens abandoned, and settled down for some serious purring and shedding. Julie petted her absently, carefully avoiding glancing at the unicorn, or even thinking about it; instead she bent all her regard on what the unicorn must have seen from her window. She recognized the UPS driver, half a dozen local joggers-each sporting a flat-lipped grin of agony suggesting that their Walkman headphones were too tight-a policewoman whom she had met on birdwatching expeditions, and the Frozen-Yogurt Man. The Frozen-Yogurt Man wore a grimy naval officer's cap the year around, along with a flapping tweed sport-jacket, sweat pants and calf-length rubber boots. He had a thin yellow-brown beard, like the stubble of a burned-over wheatfield, and had never been seen, as far as Julie knew, without a frozen-yogurt cone in at least one hand. Farrell said he favored plain vanilla in a sugar cone. "With M&Ms on top. Very California."

NMC raised an ear and opened an eye, and Julie turned her head to see the unicorn once again poised atop the steamer trunk, staring down at the Frozen-Yogurt Man with the soft hairs of its mane standing erect from nape to withers. (Did it pick that up from the cats? Julie wondered in some alarm.) "He's harmless," she said, feeling silly but needing to speak. "There must have been lots of people like him in your time. Only then there was a place for them, they had names, they fit the world somewhere. Mendicant friars, I guess. Hermits."

The unicorn leaped at the window. Julie had no more than a second's warning: the dainty head lowered only a trifle, the sleek miniature hindquarters seemed hardly to flex at all; but suddenly-so fast that she had no time even to register the explosion of the gla.s.s, the unicorn was nearly through. Blood raced down the white neck, tracing the curve of the straining belly.

Julie never remembered whether she cried out or not, never remembered moving. She was simply at the window with her hands surrounding the unicorn, pulling it back as gently as she possibly could, praying in silent desperation not to catch its throat on a fang of gla.s.s. Her hands were covered with blood-some of it hers-by the time the unicorn came free, but she saw quickly that its wounds were superficial, already coagulating and closing as she looked on. The unicorn's blood was as red as her own, but there was a strange golden shadow about it: a dark sparkling just under or beyond her eyes' understanding. She dabbed at it ineffectually with a paper towel, while the unicorn struggled in her grasp. Strangely, she could feel that it was not putting forth its entire strength; though whether from fear of hurting her or for some other reason, she could not say.

"All right," she said harshly. "All right. He's only the Frozen-Yogurt Man, for G.o.d's sake, but all right, I'll take you to him. I'll take you wherever you want-we won't wait for Joe, we'll just go out. Only you have to stay in my pocket. In my pocket, okay?"

The unicorn quieted slowly between her hands. She could not read the expression in the great, bruise-colored eyes, but it made no further attempt to escape when she set it down and began to patch the broken window with cardboard and packing tape. That done, she donned the St. Vincent de Paul duffel coat she wore all winter, and carefully deposited the unicorn in the wrist-deep right pocket Then she pinned a note on the door for Farrell, pushed two kittens away from it with her foot, shut it, said aloud, "Okay, you got it," and went down into the street.

The sun was high and warm, but a chill breeze lurked in the shade of the old trees. Julie felt the unicorn move in her pocket, and looked down to see the narrow, delicate head poke out from under the flap. "Back in there," she said, amazed at her own firmness. "Five hundred, a thousand years-don't you know what happens by now? When people see you?" The unicorn retreated without protest.

She could see the Frozen-Yogurt Man's naval cap a block ahead, bobbing with his shuffling gait. There were a lot of bodies between them, and she increased her own pace, keeping a hand over her pocket as she slipped between strollers and dodged coffeehouse tables. Once, sidestepping a skateboarder, she tripped hard over a broken slab of sidewalk and stumbled to hands and knees, instinctively twisting her body to fall to the left. She was up in a moment, unhurt, hurrying on.

When she did catch up with the Frozen-Yogurt Man, and he turned his blindly benign gaze on her, she hesitated, completely uncertain of how to approach him. She had never spoken to him, nor even seen him close enough to notice that he was almost an albino, with coral eyes and pebbly skin literally the color of yogurt. She cupped her hand around the unicorn in her pocket, smiled and said, "Hi."

The Frozen-Yogurt Man said thoughtfully, as though they were picking up an interrupted conversation, "You think they know what they're doing?" His voice was loud and metallic, not quite connecting one word with another. It sounded to Julie like the synthesized voices that told her which b.u.t.tons on her telephone to push.

"No," she answered without hesitation. "No, whatever you're talking about. I don't think anybody knows what they're doing anymore."

The Frozen-Yogurt Man interrupted her. "I think they do. I think they do. I think they do." Julie thought he might go on repeating the words forever; but she felt the stir against her side again, and the Frozen-Yogurt Man's flat pink eyes s.h.i.+fted and widened. "What's that?" he demanded shrilly. "What's that watching me?"

The unicorn was halfway out of her coat pocket, front legs flailing as it yearned toward the Frozen-Yogurt Man. Only the reluctance of pa.s.sersby to make eye contact with either him or Julie spared the creature from notice. She grabbed it with both hands, forcing it back, telling it in a frantic hiss, "Stay there, you stay, he isn't the one! I don't know whom you're looking for, but it's not him." But the unicorn thrashed in the folds of cloth as though it were drowning.

The Frozen-Yogurt Man was backing away, his hands out, his face melting. Ever afterward, glimpsing him across the street, Julie felt chillingly guilty for having seen him so. In a phlegmy whisper he said, "Oh, no-oh, no, no, you don't put that thing on me. No, I been watching you all the time, you get away, you get away from me with that thing. You people, you put that chip behind my ear, you put them radio mice in my stomach-you get away, you don't put nothing more on me, you done me enough." He was screaming now, and the officer's cap was tipping forward, revealing a scarred scalp the color of the sidewalk. "You done me enough! You done me enough!"

Julie fled. She managed at first to keep herself under control, easing away sedately enough through the scattering of mildly curious spectators; it was only when she was well down the block and could still hear the Frozen-Yogurt Man's terrified wailing that she began to run. Under the hand that she still kept in her pocket, the unicorn seemed to have grown calm again, but its heart was beating in tumultuous rhythm with her own. She ran on until she came to a bus stop and collapsed on the bench there, gasping for breath, rocking back and forth, weeping dryly for the Frozen-Yogurt Man.

She came back to herself only when she felt the touch of a cool, soft nose just under her right ear. Keeping her head turned away, she said hoa.r.s.ely, "Just let me sit here a minute, all right? I did what you wanted. I'm sorry it didn't work out. You get back down before somebody sees you."

A warm breath stirred the hairs on Julie's arms, and she raised her head to meet the hopeful brown eyes and all-purpose grin of a young golden retriever. The dog was looking brightly back and forth between her and the unicorn, wagging its entire body from the ears on down, back feet dancing eagerly. The unicorn leaned precariously from Julie's pocket to touch noses with it.

"No one's ever going to believe you," Julie said to the dog. The golden retriever listened attentively, waited a moment to make certain she had no more to confide, and then gravely licked the unicorn's head, the great red tongue almost wrapping it round. NMC's incessant grooming had plainly not prepared the unicorn for anything like this; it sneezed and took refuge in the depths of the pocket. Julie said, "Not a living soul."

The dog's owner appeared then, apologizing and grabbing its dangling leash to lead it away. It looked back, whining, and its master had to drag it all the way to the corner. Julie still huddled and rocked on the bus stop bench, but when the unicorn put its head out again she was laughing thinly. She ran a forefinger down its mane, and then laid two fingers gently against the wary, pulsing neck. She said, "Burnouts. Is that it? You're looking for one of our famous Avicenna loonies, none with less than a master's, each with a direct line to Mars, Atlantis, Lemuria, Graceland or Mount Shasta? Is that it?" For the first time, the unicorn pushed its head hard into her hand, as NMC would do. The horn p.r.i.c.ked her palm lightly.

For the next three hours, she made her way from the downtown streets to the university's red-tiled enclave, and back again, with small side excursions into doorways, subway stations, even parking lots. She developed a peculiar cramp in her neck from snapping frequent glances at her pocket to be sure that the unicorn was staying out of sight. Whenever it indicated interest in a wild red gaze, storks'-nest hair, a shopping cart crammed with green plastic bags, or a droning monologue concerning Jesus, AIDS, and the Kennedys, she trudged doggedly after one more street apostle to open one more conversation with the moon. Once the unicorn showed itself, the result was always the same.

"It likes beards," she told Farrell late that night, as he patiently ma.s.saged her feet. "Bushy beards-the wilder and filthier, the better. Hair, too, especially that pattern baldness tonsure look. Sandals, yes, definitely-it doesn't like boots or sneakers at all, and it can't make up its mind about Birkenstocks. Prefers blankets and serapes to coats, dark hair to light, older to younger, the silent ones to the walking sound trucks-men to women, absolutely. Won't even stick its head out for a woman."

"It's hard to blame the poor thing," Farrell mused. "For a unicorn, men would be a bunch of big, stupid guys with swords and whatnot. Women are betrayal, every time, simple as that. It wasn't Gloria Steinem who wove that tapestry." He squeezed toes gently with one hand, a bruised heel with the other. "What did they do when they actually saw it?"

The unicorn glanced at them over the edge of the cat box, where its visit had been cause for an orgy of squeaking, purring and teething. Julie said, "What do you think? It was bad. It got pretty d.a.m.n awful. Some of them fell down on their knees and started laughing and crying and praying their heads off. There were a couple who just sort of crooned and moaned to it-and I told you about the poor Frozen-Yogurt Man-and then there was one guy who tried to grab it away and run off with it. But it wasn't having that, and it jabbed him really hard. n.o.body noticed, thank G.o.d." She laughed wearily, presenting her other foot for treatment. "The rest-oh, I'd say they should be halfway to Portland by now. Screaming all the way."

Farrell grunted thoughtfully, but asked no more questions until Julie was in bed and he was sitting across the room playing her favorite Campion lute song. She was nearly asleep when his voice b.u.mbled slowly against her half-dream like a fly at a window. "It can't know anyone who's not in the tapestry. There's the answer. There it is."

"There it is," she echoed him, barely hearing her own words. Farrell put down the lute and came to her, sitting on the bed to grip her shoulder.

"Jewel, listen, wake up and listen to me! It's trying to find someone who was in that tapestry with it-we even know what he looks like, more or less. An old guy, ragged and dirty, big beard, sandals-some kind of monk, most likely. Though what a unicorn would be doing anywhere near your average monk is more than I can figure. Are you awake, Jewel?"

"Yes," she mumbled. "No. Wasn't anybody else. Sleep."

Somewhere very far away Farrell said, "We didn't see anybody else." Julie felt the bed sway as he stood up. "Tomorrow night," he said. "Tomorrow's Sat.u.r.day, they stay open later on Sat.u.r.days. You sleep, I'll call you." She drifted off in confidence that he would lock the door carefully behind him, even without a key.

A temporary word-processing job, in company with a deadline for a set of views of diseased kidneys, filled up most of the next day for her. She was still weary, vaguely depressed, and grateful when she returned home to find the unicorn thoroughly occupied in playing on the studio floor with three of NMC's kittens. The game appeared to involve a good deal of stiff-legged pouncing, an equal amount of spinning and side-slipping on the part of the unicorn, all leading to a grand climax in which the kittens tumbled furiously over one another while the unicorn looked on, forgotten until the next round. They never came close to laying a paw on their swift littermate, and the unicorn in turn treated them with effortless care. Julie watched for a long time, until the kittens abruptly fell asleep.

"I guess that's what being immortal is like," she said aloud. The unicorn looked back at her, its eyes gone almost black. Julie said, "One minute they're romping around with you-the next, they're sleeping. Right in the middle of the game. We're all kittens to you."

The unicorn did a strange thing then. It came to her and indicated with an imperious motion of its head that it wanted to be picked up. Julie bent down to lift it, and it stepped off her joined palms into her lap, where-after pawing gently for a moment, like a dog settling in for the night-it folded its long legs and put its head down. Julie's heart hiccuped absurdly in her breast.

"I'm not a virgin," she said. "But you know that." The unicorn closed its eyes.

Neither of them had moved when Farrell arrived, looking distinctly irritated and hara.s.sed. "I left Gracie to finish up," he said. "Gracie. If I still have my job tomorrow, it'll be more of a miracle than any mythical beast. Let's go."

In the van, with the unicorn once again curled deep in Julie's pocket, Farrell said, "What we have to do is, we have to take a look at the tapestry again. A good long look this time."

"It's not going back there. I told you that." She closed her hand lightly around the unicorn, barely touching it, more for her own heartening than its rea.s.surance. "Joe, if that's what you're planning-"

Farrell grinned at her through the timeless fast-food twilight of Madame Schumann-Heink. "No wonder you're in such good shape, all that jumping to conclusions. Listen, there has to be some other figure in that smudgy thing, someone we didn't see before. Our little friend has a friend."

Julie considered briefly, then shook her head. "No. No way. There was the knight, the squire, and that woman. That's all, I'm sure of it."

"Um," Farrell said. "Now, me, I'm never entirely sure of anything. You've probably noticed, over the years. Come on, Madame, you can do it." He dropped the van into first gear and gunned it savagely up a steep, narrow street. "We didn't see the fourth figure because we weren't looking for it. But it's there, it has to be. This isn't Comparative Mythology, Jewel, this is me."

Madame Schumann-Heink actually gained the top of the hill without stalling, and Farrell rewarded such valor by letting the old van free-wheel down the other side. Julie said slowly, "And if it is there? What happens then?"

"No idea. The usual. Play it by ear and trust we'll know the right thing to do. You will, anyway. You always know the right thing to do, Tanikawa."

The casual words startled her so deeply that she actually covered her mouth for a moment: a cla.s.sic j.a.panese mannerism she had left behind in her Seattle childhood.

"You never told me that before. Twenty years, and you never said anything like that to me." Farrell was crooning placatingly to Madame Schumann-Heink's brake shoes, and did not answer. Julie said, "Even if I did always know, which I don't, I don't always do it. Not even usually. Hardly ever, the way I feel right now."

Farrell let the van coast to a stop under a traffic light before he turned to her. His voice was low enough that she had to bend close to hear him. "All I know," he said, "there are two of us girls in this heap, and one of us had a unicorn sleeping in her lap a little while back. You work it out." He cozened Madame Schumann-Heink back into gear, and they lurched on toward the Bigby Museum.

A different guard this time: trimmer, younger, far less inclined to speculative conversation, and even less likely to overlook dubious goings-on around the exhibits. Fortunately, there was also a university-sponsored lecture going on: it appeared to be the official word on the Brueghels, and had drawn a decent house for a Sat.u.r.day night. Under his breath, Farrell said, "We split up. You go that way, I'll ease around by the Spanish stuff. Take your time."

Julie took him at his word, moving slowly through the crowd and pausing occasionally for brief murmured conversations with academic acquaintances. Once she plainly took exception to the speaker's comments regarding Brueghel's artistic debt to his father-in-law, and Farrell, watching from across the room, fully expected her to interrupt the lecture with a discourse of her own. But she resisted temptation; they met, as planned, by the three tapestries, out of the guard's line of sight, and with only a single bored-looking browser anywhere near them. Julie held Farrell's hand tightly as they turned to study the middle tapestry.

Nothing had changed. The knight and squire still prodded a void toward their pale lady, who went on leaning forward to drape her wreath around captive s.p.a.ce. Julie imagined a bleak recognition in their eyes of knotted thread that had not been there before, but she felt foolish about that and said nothing to Farrell. Silently the two of them divided the tapestry into fields of survey, as they had done with the gallery itself when the unicorn first escaped. Julie took the foreground, scanning the ornamental garden framing the three human figures for one more face, likely dirty and bearded, perhaps by now so faded as to merge completely with the faded leaves and shadows. She was on her third futile sweep over the scene when she heard Farrell's soft hiss beside her.

"Yes!" he whispered. "Got you, you G.o.dly little recluse, you. I knew you had to be in there!" He grabbed Julie's hand and drew it straight up to the vegetable-looking forest surrounding the distant castle. "Right there, peeping coyly out like Julia's feet, you can't miss him."

But she could, and she did, for a maddening while; until Farrell made her focus on a tiny shape, a gray-white bulge at the base of one of the trees. Nose hard against the gla.s.s, she began at last to see it clearly: all robe and beard, mostly, but st.i.tched with enough maniacal medieval detail to suggest a bald head, intense black eyes and a wondering expression. Farrell said proudly, "Your basic resident hermit. Absolutely required, no self-respecting feudal estate complete without one. There's our boy."

It seemed to Julie that the lady and the two men were straining their embroidered necks to turn toward the castle and the solitary form they had forgotten for five centuries. "Him?" she said. "He's the one?"

"Hold our friend up to see him. Watch what happens."

For a while, afterward, she tried to forget how grudgingly she had reached into her coat pocket and slowly brought her cupped hand up again, into the light. Farrell s.h.i.+fted position, moving close on her right to block any possible glimpse of the unicorn. It posed on Julie's palm, head high, three legs splayed slightly for balance, and one forefoot proudly curled, (exactly like every unicorn I ever drew when I was young.) She looked around quickly-half afraid of being observed, half wis.h.i.+ng it-and raised her hand to bring the unicorn level with the dim little figure of the hermit.

Three things happened then. The unicorn uttered a harsh, achingly plain cry of recognition and longing, momentarily silencing the Brueghel lecturer around the corner. At the same time, a different sound, low and disquieting, like a sleeper's teeth grinding together, seemed to come either from the frame enclosing the tapestry or the gla.s.s over it. The third occurrence was that something she could not see, nor ever after describe to Farrell, gripped Julie's right wrist so strongly that she cried out herself and almost dropped the unicorn to the gallery floor. She braced it with her free hand as it scrambled for purchase, the carpet-tack horn glowing like abalone sh.e.l.l.

"What is it, what's the matter?" Farrell demanded. He made clumsily to hold her, but she shook him away. Whatever had her wrist tightened its clamp, feeling nothing at all like a human hand, but rather as though the air itself were turning to stone-as though one part of her were being buried while the rest stood helplessly by. Her fingers could yet move, enough to hold the unicorn safe; but there was no resisting the force that was pus.h.i.+ng her arm back down toward the tapestry foreground, back to the knight and the squire, the mincing damsel and the strangling garden. They want it. It is theirs. Give it to them. They want it.

"Fat f.u.c.king chance, buster," she said loudly. Her right hand was almost numb, but she felt the unicorn rearing in her palm, felt its rage shock through her stone arm, and watched from very far away as the bright horn touched the tapestry frame.

Almost silently, the gla.s.s shattered. There was only one small hole at first, popping into view just above the squire's lumpy face; then the cracks went spidering across the entire surface, making a tiny scratching sound, like mice in the walls. One by one, quite deliberately, the pieces of gla.s.s began to fall out of the frame, to splinter again on the hardwood floor.

With the first fragment, Julie's arm was her own once more, freezing cold and barely controllable, but free. She lurched forward, off-balance, and might easily have shoved the unicorn back into the garden after all. But Farrell caught her, steadying her hand as she raised it to the shelter of the forest and the face under the trees.

The unicorn turned its head. Julie caught the brilliant purple glance out of the air and tucked it away in herself, to keep for later. She could hear voices approaching now, and quick, officious footsteps that didn't sound like those of an art historian. As briskly as she might have shooed one of NMC's kittens from underfoot, she said, in the language that sounded like j.a.panese, "Go on, then, go. Go home."

She never actually saw the unicorn flow from her hand into the tapestry. Whenever she tried to make herself recall the moment, memory dutifully producing a rainbow flash or a melting movie-dissolve pa.s.sage between worlds, irritable honesty told memory to put a sock in it. There was never anything more than herself standing in a lot of broken gla.s.s for the second time in two days, with a faint chill in her right arm, hearing Farrell's eloquently indignant voice denying to guards, docents and lecturers alike that either of them had laid a hand on this third-rate Belgian throw rug. He was still expounding a theory involving cool recycled air on the outside of the gla.s.s and warm condensation within as they were escorted all the way to the parking lot. When Julie praised his pa.s.sionate inventiveness, he only growled, "Maybe that's the way it really was. How do I know?"

But she knew without asking that he had seen what she had seen: the pale shadow peering back at them from its sanctuary in the wood, and the opaline glimmer of a horn under the hermit's hand. Knight, lady and squire-one another's prisoners now, eternally-remained exactly where they were.

That night neither Farrell nor Julie slept at all. They lay silently close, peacefully wide-awake, companionably solitary, listening to her beloved Black-Forest-tourist-trash cuckoo clock strike the hours. In the morning Farrell said it was because NMC had carried on so, roaming the apartment endlessly in search of her lost nursling. But Julie answered, "We didn't need to sleep. We needed to be quiet and tell ourselves what happened to us. To hear the story."

Farrell was staring blankly into the open refrigerator, as he had been for some time. "I'm still not sure what happened. I get right up to the place where you lifted it up so it could see its little hermit buddy, and then your arm...I can't ever figure that part. What the h.e.l.l was it that had hold of you?"

"I don't see how we'll ever know," she said. "It could have been them, those three-some force they were able to put out together that almost made me put the unicorn back with them, in the garden." She s.h.i.+vered briefly, then slipped past him to take out the eggs, milk and smoked salmon he had vaguely been seeking, and close the refrigerator door.

Farrell shook his head slowly. "They weren't real. Not like the unicorn. Even your grandmother couldn't have brought one of them to life on this side. Colored thread, that's all they were. The hermit, the monk, whatever-I don't know, Jewel."

"I don't know either," she said. "Listen. Listen, I'll tell you what I think I think. Maybe whoever wove that tapestry meant to trap a unicorn, meant to keep it penned up there forever. Not a wicked wizard, nothing like that, just the weaver, the artist. It's the way we are, we all want to paint or write or play something so for once it'll stay painted, stay played, stay put, so it'll still be alive for us tomorrow, next week, always. Mostly it dies in the night-but now and then, now and then, somebody gets it right. And when you get it right, then it's real. Even if it doesn't exist, like a unicorn, if you get it really right..."

She let the last words trail away. Farrell said, "Garlic. I bet you don't have any garlic, you never do." He opened the refrigerator again and rummaged, saying over his shoulder, "So you think it was the weaver himself, herself, grabbing you, from back there in the fifteenth century? Wanting you to put things back the way you found them, the way he had it-the right way?"

"Maybe." Julie rubbed her arm unconsciously, though the coldness was long since gone. "Maybe. Too bad for him. Right isn't absolutely everything."

"Garlic is," Farrell said from the depths of the vegetable bin. Emerging in triumph, brandis.h.i.+ng a handful of withered-looking cloves, he added, "That's my Jewel. Priorities on straight, and a strong but highly negotiable sense of morality. The thing I've always loved about you, all these years."

Neither of them spoke for some while. Farrell peeled garlic and broke eggs into a bowl, and Julie fed NMC. The omelets were almost done before she said, "We might manage to put up with each other a bit longer than usual this time. Us old guys. I mean, I've signed a lease on this place, I can't go anywhere."

"Hand me the cayenne," Farrell said. "Madame Schumann-Heink can still manage the Bay Bridge these days, but I don't think I'd try her over the Golden Gate. Your house and the restaurant, that's about her limit."

"You'd probably have to go a bit light on the garlic. Only a bit, that's all. And I still don't like people around when I'm working. And I still read in the bathroom."

Farrell smiled at her then, brus.h.i.+ng gray hair out of his eyes. "That's all right, there's always the litter box. Just don't you go marrying any Brians. Definitely no Brians."

"Fair enough," she said. "Think of it-you could have a real key, and not have to pick the lock every time. Hold still, there's egg on your forehead." The omelets got burned.

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Urban Fantasy.

Paula Guran.

No publis.h.i.+ng mastermind creates genres, subgenres, or categories. They arise due to public demand. No writer sets out to invent them. An imaginative author-who is influenced by what she or he has experienced, heard, seen, knows-writes her or his unique work. Often, around the same time, there is another writer or two who-through sheer serendipity or cultural zeitgeist-may be writing stories that have a similar appeal. For various reasons that one can theorize about, but no one really understands, the fiction gains popularity. If a type of fiction is seen as marketable, the places that sell books want more of "that sort of book," and the publishers provide them. An example, as Joe R. Lansdale has pointed out elsewhere in this volume, is horror. It did not become a commercial category until the 1980s after the phenomenon named Stephen King came along.

More recently, readers wanted a type of fantasy novel that was set in an alternate version of our contemporary/near-contemporary (but not always urban) world with a female (sometimes male) protagonist who usually (but not always) has (or develops) a certain amount of "kicka.s.situde." She possesses supernatural powers or a connection to those with such powers (or gains them for herself ). The books often had a detective-style plot-or at least something that had to be revealed/discovered-with (usually but not always) a romantic relations.h.i.+p as at least one subplot. Action-oriented, they often included horrific elements balanced with humor. The comedy might be snarky, twinged with morbidity, or downright funny, but the universe was still, overall, dark. When romance (and/or s.e.x) was involved it was written either from the female perspective or a balance of female and male. The protagonist was also usually involved in a journey of self-discovery. This evolving character development, complex universe, and complicated storylines usually required more than one book to resolve.

A type of fiction that didn't really have a name, this nameless genre/ subgenre/genre blend became the most popular and bestselling fantasy of the last ten years.

How did it come to be known as urban fantasy?

In the 1990s and first years of the twenty-first century, the term paranormal romance was often used by the media and reviewers in publications such as the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, etc. to describe fantasy books like those written by Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris as well as those by Christine Feehan, Maggie Shayne, and others. Previously, Anne Rice's work-her Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976-had often been referred to as paranormal romance.

The romance genre has identified one of its many subgenres as paranormal romance for at least two decades. (The Romance Writers of America introduced a Futuristic/Fantasy/Paranormal category for the organization's RITA awards in 1991. It is currently called, more succinctly, Best Paranormal Novel.) As with any long-established subgenre, its definition has changed over the years, but it has never been confined only to a contemporary setting; it included time-travel, historical fantasy, and science fictional romance too.

But of the examples mentioned above, only Maggie Shayne's (her Wings in the Night series, started in 1993 with Twilight Phantasies) and Feehan's books (Dark Prince, first of her Dark series, was published in 1999) were published as romance and conformed to that genre's expectations of a love relations.h.i.+p central to the plot with a positive, satisfying ending in which the reader is a.s.sured the couple will remain together.

Rice, although her fame has come from writing about vampires and witches, has always shunned labels and her books are commonly shelved in bookstores simply as "fiction." It certainly isn't genre romance.

Hamilton's first Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novel, Guilty Pleasures, was published in 1993. Set in an alternate world where the supernatural is known to exist and the preternatural have been granted equal rights in the U.S., Hamilton's earliest books did have a romantic aspect, but Anita Blake was closer to a horrific version of mystery novelist Sue Grafton's character Kinsey Millhone than a romance heroine.

Charlaine Harris's first Southern Vampire Mysteries novel, Dead Until Dark, won an Anthony Award as Best Paperback Mystery of 2001. Her heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, lives in a world where supernatural creatures have recently "come out" and co-exist with humans. As a secret telepath, Sookie has problems dating fellow humans until she meets a vampire whose mind she can't read.

n.o.body called these books "urban fantasy," at the time. Nor, at first, were Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series (first book: Bitten, 2001) or Kim Harrison's Dead Witch Walking (2004), the first of her Rachel Morgan novels, or any of the other novels of this increasingly popular fantasy. It wasn't romance and even though it was dark and vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures were involved, you couldn't call it horror. For the most part it was just "fantasy"-even if reviewers, journalists, and others sometimes misnamed it as paranormal romance.

Meanwhile true paranormal romance set in an alternate world similar to our own-some with the romance occurring in a well-built fantasy universe, some with only a nod to meaningful fantastic elements-was selling well too. Heroines and heroes found each other and a happy-ever-after ending (even if one's true love happened to be a vampire or demon or werewolf ) while saving the world from supernatural nastiness (often in the form of vampires, demons, werewolves, etc.) [I edited The Year's Best Paranormal Fiction anthology in 2006, with a lengthy introduction about the romance tradition and definition. It pointed out the difference between "fantasy with some romance" and fiction from the marketing category called romance, but suggested we just call it all paranormal romance. It was a lame attempt and I now disavow it. The next volume was called The Year's Best Romantic Fantasy and then (against the publisher's wishes at the time) I killed the series. But that is another story. Let's just say I saw the light.]

Around 2005, the term urban fantasy started to be used to differentiate novels that were not "paranormal romance-according-to-romance-genre." Outside of the simple fact there were starting to be a lot of books of this type being published and they were being published as fantasy-printed on the spine and categorized by BISAC Subject Code (a list used to categorize books based on topical content that theoretically determines where the work is shelved or the genre under which it can be searched for in a database)-I suspect, but have no proof, that the term popped up for two reasons.

First, although some fans could not care less about labels, readers who wanted romance resented books not fitting their expectations being called romance. There seemed to be a suspicion, too, among some more vociferous fans that "someone" was trying to sneak non-romance into the romance sections of bookstores. That being said, many romance readers seemed to be receptive to fantasy and flexible about "crossing the aisle" without prejudice.

Perhaps more importantly, writers of fantasy of this type, primarily women, weren't getting respect from their peers or the fantasy "experts." (Books by male authors-most notably Jim Butcher-whose books appealed to the same readers.h.i.+p weren't being called paranormal romance.) They wrote fantasy and wanted it to be recognized as such. These books were the hottest thing in the fantasy field and bringing in throngs of new readers-many of whom had previously read mostly romance or mystery or were discovering fantasy for the first time or realizing fantasy wasn't what they had thought it was-yet the authors and the fiction as a whole were being ignored (even derided) by the field itself and most of its established mavens.

Somehow or another-sometimes appropriately, sometimes not-this type of fantasy came to be called urban fantasy. It gave readers and authors something new to debate, but I'm not sure it made much of a corrective dent in the perspectives of many in the sf/f community or the media.

Of course there are authors of "this stuff" who can't neatly be labeled as either paranormal romance or urban fantasy. There are writers like MaryJanice Davidson, Shanna Swendson, and Julie Kenner who write lighter fare that has been placed into one category or another almost arbitrarily. Books can be unintentionally or even intentionally mislabeled by publishers, or series can evolve out of or into one genre or the other.

But, trust me, the terms are not interchangeable.

Calling these books urban fantasy, however, confused longtime fantasy lovers and ruffled some definitional feathers. The term (and the fiction it then described) first gained popularity in the 1980s. To quote John Clute on "Urban Fantasy" in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (ed. by J. Clute & J. Grant, 1997): Urban fantasy.... A city may be seen from afar, and is generally seen clear; the UF is told from within and from the perspective of characters acting out their roles, it may be difficult to determine the extent and nature of the surrounding reality. UFs are normally texts where fantasy and the mundane world interact, intersect and interweave throughout a tale which is significantly about a real city.

Authors (and landmark works) most commonly cited as early examples of urban fantasy include Jonathan Carroll (The Land of Laughs, 1980), John Crowley (Little, Big; 1981), Charles de Lint (Moonheart, 1984), and Emma Bull (War for the Oaks, 1987). Additionally, Terri Windling's shared-world anthology for teens (co-edited with Mark Alan Arnold), Borderland, (1986) and its subsequent series of anthologies and novels are important early works. When discussing this type of urban fantasy in a larger context, authors like Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Caitlin R. Kiernan are often mentioned.

As for the ruffling of feathers, well, most of those feathers belonged to folks unacquainted with a broad enough range of this "new" urban fantasy to make any judgment calls to start with. But, hey, not really knowing much about playing a sport doesn't keep anyone from second-guessing a team or its coaches, either.

Charles de Lint wrote that he feels the subt.i.tle of his novel Jack of Kinrowan: A Novel of Urban Faerie led to his work becoming termed urban fantasy. He and Terri Windling came up with "mythic fiction" to better describe their strain of the fantastic. It is an admirable and workable definition and now used by knowledgeable readers, critics, and academics.

I don't like less-than-well-thought-out labels any more than Joe Lansdale does, and agree the more a type of fiction is "directed" like cows through a chute the more likely it is "all going to end in the slaughterhouse."